In World's Fair (1985) E.L. (Edgar Lawrence) Doctorow (1931-) artistically transforms autobiographical and historical facts and memories of the actual world of his childhood into a Bildungsroman. Doctorow was in his fifties when he wrote this novel, which is widely regarded as more autobiographic than his other Bildungsromane, namely The Book of Daniel (1971), Loon Lake (1980) and Billy Bathgate (1989). This fictionalisation takes place through the use of a retrospective narrator who depicts the memories of his formative experiences as a nine-year-old boy. The novel is marked by a striking structural feature, namely that positive and sombre or serious events alternate. The question therefore arises: Why does Doctorow construct his childhood memoir in this manner? In brief, the answer is that the narrator's Bildungdepends on a carnivalesque dialectic of dangerous and/or threatening events and the relief and/or repair of these same events. This article therefore attempts to make sense of World's Fair in terms of selected aspects of M.M. Bakhtin's notion of 'carnival'. It shows a clear link between, on the one hand, this novel's status as a Bildungsroman along with the personal growth of the narrator and central character and, on the other hand, a carnivalesque dialectic of seriousness and amelioration. It thus shows that the main theme of the book is, in fact, the reliance of growth on this dialectic. The article begins with a brief analysis of the novel in terms of its semi-autobiographic character and then provides an equally brief overview of Bakhtin's (1984, 1985) notion of carnival. The main body of the text provides examples from the novel and thus evidence for the above-mentioned dialectic.

Henri Pierre Roché (1879-1959), the author of Jules et Jim, has been called a general introducer, an exemplary amateur, a collector of women and art and one of the most prolific diarists and active lovers in recorded history. Author of a collection of vignettes about Don Juan, Roché was fascinated with the figure of the seducer and in his twenties planned to devote his life to the creation of a body of work which would examine moral, intellectual, social and sexual relations between women and men. To this end, he would transform his life into a laboratory where real-life experiences would become the main source of reference. Roché's diary spans sixty years and abounds in tales of seduction. However, the most intense and captivating intrigue of seduction and betrayal in his diary, is his relationship with Helen Hessel. At the start of their affair, Roché suggested that she too should keep a diary of the maelstrom of passion into which they were plunged. Written in French, German and English, Helen Hessel's diary captures the drama of seduction and functions on several levels: realistic, visionary, absorbed in her thoughts and emotions and yet critical of herself and others. A juxtaposed reading of the two diaries generates a fascinatingly dense texture, revealing the mechanisms of seduction at play. The counterpoint created by these two interdependent voices becomes ever more complex as one becomes aware of the intertextual references that contribute to the emerging polyphony of recorded life and love.

It could be argued that an important feature of Richard Murphy's work, and of his identity as a poet is the relationship between the creative self and a particular place, where 'place' should be understood as referring not just to physical qualities of the natural environment, but in a broader sense to denote an environment in which everything is interrelated and connected, and in which there is no sharp division between the natural and the human. The landscape providing inspiration for Murphy's poetic imagination is the landscapes and seascapes of Connemara in north-west Ireland. In 1959 he settled in this environment which was to be his base for the next 20 years and from this period and this location emanated the bulk of his poetic oeuvre. For Murphy committing to a life of writing poetry necessarily means being in the Connemara landscape. Returning to this environment in adulthood represents a quest for recovering childhood feelings, of belonging and love, as connected to particular places. Murphy's Connemara poems could be read as an account of this process of re-placement, as a type of autobiographical text in which the artist creates a 'double portrait': in writing about the landscape he also writes about himself, creating a place-portrait which is, at the same time, a self-portrait.

This special edition of Literator, devoted to autobiography, is based on papers delivered at the Workshop on Autobiography, Autofiction and Life Writing, held at North-West University, Potchefstroom campus, between the 07 and 09 August 2014. The bilingual workshop (French and English) was hosted by the Department of French and was seamlessly coordinated and run by Professor Elisabeth Snyman and her team. Selected French papers from the workshop will be published separately, in French Studies in Southern Africa. Scholars attended from different parts of the country and from much further afield. We were privileged to have two world-renowned keynote speakers. Professor Michael Sheringham from All Souls College, Oxford, gave a fascinating address included in this special edition; it is presented (at his request) largely in its original oral format. The other keynote speaker, Dr Catherine Viollet, from the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) in France, spoke on genetic criticism and autobiography. Sadly, she passed away a bare month after the workshop, on 15 September 2014. We take this opportunity to extend our condolences to her family and friends. (Her talk was not available for publication, but readers interested in her work are recommended to look at her essay, 'Proust's "Confession of a Young Girl": Truth or Fiction?', in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, edited by Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, published in 2004 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.)

The autobiographical process involves not just reporting on past events, reconstructing one's life history, but replaying events in different voices and modes. It may be that the autobiographer is motivated by the desire to impose one version of her or his life and to scotch the others. Even then, however, other versions, the ones under erasure, often show through the fabric - the fabrication - and we detect their traces in the turns of the rhetoric. Thus, in autobiography, the real agenda is often underneath, either because a less official motive lurks behind the manifest ones or because what really drives the project of self-scrutiny is something only progressively revealed in the process of writing. This issue takes into consideration the structuring implications of turning points in the account of a life and the roles of the converse forces of forgetting and subjective destabilisation. There are two ways of looking at turning points: either as causative agents of order and coherence or as metaphors - as provisional, semi-fictional, forensic, cognitive instruments. In the latter case, they belong to an active, performative, conjectural, self-revising process, and they complement a version of autobiographical memory that involves a constant interplay of remembering and forgetting.

When Joanne Leonard's photo collage Romanticism is ultimately fatal (1972) appeared in H.W. Janson's History of art, the image brought her recognition as an artist. It gave her the confidence to further develop her technique of making photo collages, and the collages became a means of giving expression to her personal emotions as well as her reactions to historical events and public debates. In 2008, Leonard published an autobiographical text, â??an intimate memoir', in which she presents a selection of photographs and photo collages narrating her development as an artist and as a person. Written text is added to the visual images, providing information about the content and technical aspects of the photographs and collages as well as about the stages of her life as a person and an artist. This article discusses Joanne Leonard's photo memoir by focussing on the relationship between identity and narrativity, on the constructed nature of all representions and especially represented autobiographical narratives and, finally, on the understanding and functioning of memory. The theoretical and philosophical aspects of identity, narrative identity, construction and memory are explored, and selected art works are analysed and discussed. The conclusion of the article suggests that autobiography, in all its variety, remains one of the most fascinating genres to study and that this photo memoir is an exceptional example.